“... William Cowper, Erasmus Darwin, Humphry Davy, Maria Edgeworth, Olaudah Equiano, Benjamin Franklin, Henry Fuseli, William Godwin, Mary Hays, William Hazlitt, Thomas Malthus, Thomas Paine, Richard Price, Joseph Priestley, Charlotte Smith, John Horne Tooke, Sarah Trimmer, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Wordsworth, as well as a number of theologians and religious ...”

“... old ladies as well as (special contempt here) relatively fit joggers. His indictments of Henry Kissinger, Mother Teresa and Bill Clinton have been among the glories of the prosecuting counsel’s art in recent years. Taking the global village as his courtroom, Hitchens asks us, the jury, to stare with wonder and loathing at these singular specimens ...”

“... Secret Harmonies). Powell was born in 1905 and died in 2000.Powell comments in the Notebook on ‘Henry James’s inability to invent good proper names’ – the inability may more properly belong to our culture, since James took a lot of his names straight from the Times – and certainly suffers from no such ...”

“... from genuine insanity. He had been complying for about a year with invitations from Henry and Hester Lynch Thrale, a newly-wed pair with a fortune made in brewing, a first baby nicknamed Queeney, unusually eatable dinners and an intent to lionise, when he was overtaken by what it maddened him to think was the madness he had feared. The Thrales ...”

“... is difficult to understand when it does . . . Bad knowledge drove out good.’ The naval surgeon James Lind continued to advocate bleeding; he failed properly to anticipate the 20th-century randomised clinical trial; and, even when he did come to realise the important role of citrus in 1747, he ‘had no clear understanding of exactly what it was that he had ...”

“... new ways to tax large concentrations of wealth, primarily by means of the share levy but also by a Henry George-style betterment levy, or a tax on increases in the value of commercial land. Of course there will be opposition, but there is also, as we have recently seen in many European capitals, great discontent at a failing pension system. At one time, income ...”

“... In ‘Margaret Fuller Drowned’, a sonnet of the early 1970s, Robert Lowell, whose ancestor James Russell Lowell had been skewered by Fuller’s pen more than a century earlier, sums up what’s commonly known about Fuller. ‘You had everything to rattle the men who wrote,’ he begins, addressing her as ‘the first American woman?’ (emphasis on the question mark ...”

“... great days under Anthony Sampson and Sylvester Stein – and the energetic assistant editor Henry Nxumalo, who was murdered on an investigative assignment – were coming to an end. Stein’s successor, Tom Hopkinson, was a more cautious editor, but Drum had assembled some of the best writers in the country, among them Es’kia Mphahlele, Lewis Nkosi ...”

“... career of Alexandre Dumas, though England was not far behind with Harrison Ainsworth and G.P.R. James. It was at this point that the historical novel started to acquire its modern ambiguity. Most literary genres have included a variety of registers, and as the Russian Formalists always emphasised, their vitality has typically depended on interactions ...”

“... who is Hazlitt’s confidant Peter George Patmore; and three to ‘J.S.K. – ’, or James Sheridan Knowles, recounting the final, farcical agonies of the affair. But the printed Liber Amoris is not the only source. There is a manuscript copy of Part One with additions and emendations in Hazlitt’s hand. There are the uncensored originals of ...”

“... visit to London, where his portrait was painted by William Hilton. Taylor and his business partner James Hessey gave a dinner for him, at which Clare met and became friends with Henry Cary, whose translation of Dante he draws on in ‘To the Snipe’. A week after returning to Helpston, he married Patty Turner, who was ...”

“... sense. There is also the extra ‘e’ on Maud, the remarriageable reader of French novels in Henry James’s ‘The Story of It’: a quirk Oppen chose not to change in later editions. Yet the drift is clear and exhilarating, and there is a cold precision, no less exhilarating, in the way the poem gets where it’s going, in a single, almost ...”

“... were also granted by authorities other than the Crown, a practice ended by statute in 1536, when Henry VIII obtained sole and exclusive authority ‘to pardon or remit any treasons, murders, manslaughters or any kinds of felonies’. By the time of the American Revolution, four features of the royal prerogative of pardon deserve mention. First, the reigning ...”

“... they supervised imprisonment orders made anywhere, by anyone, for any reason.’ Chief Justice Sir Henry Montagu, writing in 1619, described habeas corpus as a ‘writ of the prerogative by which the king demands account for his subject who is restrained of his liberty’. It was a remedy developed, primarily, in the court of King’s (and ...”

“... most Mahler conductors for the rest of the 20th century. As the musicologist and Mahler biographer Henry Louis le Grange wrote in liner notes for a 1995 recording of the symphony by Boulez, ‘Why would Alma lie?’ In the past decade or so – influenced by a 2002 paper by Jerry Bruck which took apart the case for Alma’s ordering of the symphony ...”